The Erleigh Cantors arrived at Guildford Cathedral at 8.30 a.m. and we finally left about 7.45 in the evening after singing three services (with a couple of free hours in the afternoon).<\/p>\n
This event featured music by a number of famous composers.\u00a0 Our Mass setting was Haydn’s\u00a0Little Organ Mass<\/em>, at Mattins we sang Vaughan Williams Te Deum<\/em> in G and the evensong anthem was Bach’s Lobet den Herrn<\/em>.\u00a0 I hadn’t sung any of the Bach motets for a while, but this one was thoroughly drilled into me in my Cambridge days, so no danger of singing a B flat for a B natural or any similar mistake.\u00a0 More of a challenge was keeping both sides and the organ together in such a broad space.<\/p>\n I’d never sung Poulenc’s Salve Regina<\/em> before, though it wasn’t hard to learn as it was full of his characteristic turns of phrase.\u00a0 Like the Sch\u00fctz motet we sang from the same book a few months ago, it reserves its highest note for the final phrase (at least in my part).\u00a0 Not quite a new piece, but I had not sung Blitheman’s In pace<\/em> for a very long time, probably not since my early student days.<\/p>\n The Erleigh Cantors have done a lot of Kenneth Leighton, but rather surprisingly until now neither of his canticle settings.\u00a0 We used the first ‘Magdalen College’ set at Evensong.\u00a0 Other twentieth-century repertoire was the Sumsion responses and And I saw a new heaven<\/em> by Bainton.<\/p>\n Evensong was the first time I’d sung at Guildford with the lights on, which enabled me to appreciate the changing patterns on the cloth which hangs behind the altar.\u00a0 A Canon of Guildford is about to move to our church, so she should feel at home with our liturgically-themed lighting!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Erleigh Cantors arrived at Guildford Cathedral at 8.30 a.m. and we finally left about 7.45 in the evening after singing three services (with a couple of free hours in the afternoon). This event featured music by a number of … Continue reading